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Understanding my faith in Santiago de Compostela
by Elizabeth Franklin, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
A view of the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
Although I didn't realize it while considering programs, where I ended up studying is a city of at least moderate significance in my faith. Santiago's cathedral houses the alleged remains of Saint James, a martyr who was thrown from the Temple's roof and stoned after refusing to recant his teachings about Jesus as the Christ. This part of the legend strikes me as plausible and, as far as I know, is widely accepted.
Nonetheless, the existence of Saint James', or Santiago's, remains in Santiago de Compostela requires one to believe that a loyal disciple, hoping to avoid the people desecrating Santiago's body, gathered his body and set sail from Jerusalem for points unknown. The boat eventually ran into the very northwest corner of Spain, at which point the disciple managed to drag Santiago's body 70 kilometers inland and bury it before dying himself of starvation, exhaustion, thirst, etc. Several centuries later, a star led someone else to Saint James's grave, and the next thing you know, Santiago de Compostela was there with a shiny new cathedral, ready to become one of Catholicism's main pilgrimage estinations.
I tend to react two ways to this history. My more ordered, logical self scoffs, perhaps acknowledges it as a neat story, but insists that there's no way this happened. This self spent the semester observing the Church and reacted to Masses in another language by focusing on the ritual of Mass and how it could be generalized to so many other faiths much more than Mass as a spiritual experience.
My second reaction to Santiago's tale is a winking, sort of amused acceptance, a "Sure, why not?" This self had much more success in Spain. This self felt called to give money to a beggar on the cathedral's steps, finally-found an acceptable apartment three hours later, and sees a connection between the two events. This self stopped a stranger in a cassock in the street because she wanted help finding a Spanish guide to the Mass, and ended up taken under the wing of one of the most important priests at the
Cathedral. This self found a great sense of closure in going to the cathedral's adoration chapel her last morning in Santiago and finding herself mentally unable to pray in anything but Spanish.
Looking at my present understanding of my faith, my semester in Spain was invaluable. Growing up in the country that pioneered separation of Church and State, a country that often didn't respect Catholics and occasionally demonized Catholicism, makes it hard for many American Roman Catholics like myself to understand just how powerful and pervasive the Church was, and is, in Europe. Sadly, my exposure to the evidence of the past also occasionally exposed me to the evidence of how poorly the Church used its power. The cathedral in Granada, a city lauded as an example of
medieval harmony among Muslims, Jews and Christians, houses a prominent relief of Saint James on horseback, trampling a Moor. The Cathedral in Granada is actually in the middle of a mind-blowing mosque as a seemingly post-reconquest "so there!" on behalf of Catholics everywhere. I spent a lot of the semester feeling guilty and trying to reconcile my understanding of myself as a socially liberal, progressive Catholic and the cruelty within parts of my Catholic heritage.
In the end, I reached this: I will be the first to admit that we've made mistakes. But I will also be quick to tell you how grateful I was to belong to a tradition that's so pervasive. Catholic with a little "c" means universal, and when traveling, that's how the Church felt.
I'm still trying to process everything I experienced last semester. My faith life played a surprisingly large role in my life in Spain, so much so that I stayed away from Church for most of the summer to recover from such intensity. But I wouldn't take back a minute of it. I wish every Catholic could see the cathedrals and struggle to reconcile the religious passion that could have inspired so much beauty with the passivity pervasive throughout the Masses. I see so much more energy in the services and congregations here at home. In the end, I still thank God almost every day that I spent last semester abroad. Part of me is glad, though, that I'm here now for those prayers.
Check us out on the Web! www.ku.edu/~osa
Jayhawks Abroad Fall 2003
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